


Love, Sufficient Unto Love

by maddieaddam



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Discussion of Severe Wounds, Existential Fluff?, M/M, Minor Character Death, Snakes, Snow Medics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 12:08:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9384314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maddieaddam/pseuds/maddieaddam
Summary: Everyone has their own ways of showing love, but as medics, Ralph Spina and Eugene Roe do so on a rather large scale. Maybe that makes it only natural for them to form a bond even they can't fully understand, but one they know doesn't need to be understood, only felt and shared.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fiction inspired by and only intended to represent the roles played in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. No disrespect is meant to the real men of Easy Company. 
> 
> I meant for this to be a quick ficlet to shake off writer's block, not a capital-S Statement about the nature of love. Oops. Title is a paraphrase of a quote by Kahlil Gibran, as used in Jason Mraz's song God Rests in Reason.

There are a few things about himself that Ralph Spina feels he knows pretty well, with unassuming certainty despite their being positive attributes: the fact that he generally makes a good friend to those around him is the strongest of those attributes, and the one in which he takes the most pride. 

His is not an aggressive or prying warmth, not the sort that will force itself on anyone who shows clear disinterest, but it’s always available and tends to earn the trust of those who seek it out. In fact, he can draw in surprising people precisely _because_ of that non-invasive approach, which he’s noticed isn’t so common when men come to other men about their problems; it can all become a sort of fix-a-thon when sometimes they just need to show their emotions in someone else’s company.

It’s not like he’s some great fount of empathy or anything – he doesn’t even think of himself as unusually sensitive, because there’s not very much that can scratch his surface deeply enough for him to feel it in a profound way, not like the people who come to him for comfort. He’s just steady and calm in a way that, for whatever reason, tends to soothe people just through being in his presence. 

Because of that, he sometimes doesn’t realize the profundity of things shared with him, or the rareness of the person who shared them opening up at all, until an outside source points it out. Like when he asks Babe what he thinks of the whole faith healer thing they do in Louisiana and gets an utterly blank stare in response. 

“You know,” Ralph says, floundering because Babe clearly doesn’t know and Ralph’s not sure whether or not that could be taken as an insult to him. “ _Traiteuses._ Not like traitor, like treating someone. It’s French.”

Slowly, a smile tugs at one corner of Babe’s mouth, and Ralph’s worries dissipate as quickly as they appeared; Babe doesn’t look offended, just pleasantly mystified. “Well, yeah, bein’ faith _healers_ and all. Gene told you about this, I’m guessin’?”

“Yeah! His grandma was one, an honest-to-God faith healer. Imagine that. He watched her do it when he was a kid, says she just did the whole layin’ on of hands routine and prayed for them to be well. And it worked! Wildest thing I ever – what?” Ralph’s once again been swept away by his wonder at the concept, so much that he’s only just noticed the strange look Babe’s got fixed on him. “ _What?_ I know it sounds a bit loony, but -”

“No, Ralph, that’s not it,” Babe laughs, shaking his head, but he never does tell Ralph what _it_ is.

They’re all yanked off the line at long, long last, holed up in a grimy, sepia-hued town called Haguenau, when Ralph is finally given cause to remember that conversation again. He and Gene are bunked together (bunked, not huddled in a foxhole, and even the rickety bunks with their barely-there mattresses feel like they’ve been sliced right off a cloud for their personal comfort) in a ground floor room, the original use of which Ralph can’t quite work out with the way it’s been mostly stripped clean; they need to be available as quickly as possible, even with no greater risks than the odd stray mortar that all the company men are skilled enough to hear far in advance and dodge, so upper levels and basements were out of the question. A library, maybe? Sitting room? He’s heard of them, but never lived in a house nice enough to have a sitting room separate from just the basic living room.

Across from where he’s seated on the bottom bunk, unlacing his boots and still frowning to himself over the men having their break stolen from them by this damn patrol, Gene’s curled up with his back against the wall and staring right at Ralph without seeing him – or the bunks, or the wall behind them, or likely anything else in the room, Ralph suspects. That’s a bad expression, a dangerous one. Gene’s too deep in his head to help anyone, and it’s because he’s anticipating the people he could need to help in a short time, and he’s got nothing to distract him from those thoughts and break the circle.

Nothing but Ralph. This is one of his easier jobs around here, all things considered, just getting Gene out of his head before the loop gets too tight and deeply engrained to break.

“Anybody home?” He wiggles the fingers of one hand up and down through the space between them, then flashes a good-natured grin when he sees life and awareness flicker back into the dark eyes fixed on him. “C’mon, Gene, give yourself a break. Nothin’ we can do ‘til there’s something to do.”

“That’s the worst part,” Gene says with a wry grin and no air of complaint in his voice, just the statement of a fact that Ralph knows all too well. For a long moment afterward, he looks like he’ll just fall right back into the near-trance of anxiety that Ralph finally managed to help him shake off, but then he starts unlacing his own boots instead. 

“Hey, don’t get crazy - I just said to take a break, not a goddamn holiday!” Ralph’s surprise is only half-feigned for humor, his eyebrows shooting up at the sight because Gene will very rarely do something for his own comfort if it could slow him down in someone’s hour of need. Even when he allows himself to sleep, and even now that they’re indoors rather than dug into frozen earth, he’s fully dressed right down to his boots and ready to run at the sound of the call. 

The extra bit of surprised act proves to be worth it when Ralph actually gets a laugh out of Gene, no more than a couple of audible, huffing breaths through his nostrils but still enough to warm his heart. Christ, he’s really grown fond of this weird, quiet, intense little guy who’s always just about killing himself to make sure everyone else stays alive. Not just admiring or respectful, which no one in the company makes any secret of feeling right along with Ralph, but _fond._ Ralph can’t decide if it’s strange for someone so distant and driven by his own private mission to inspire those sorts of feelings or the most natural thing in the world, because he’s never felt them for someone quite like this.

In so, so many respects.

“Don’t call the funny farm just yet, that’s as far as I’m goin’,” Gene murmurs, voice low but still discernibly amused, giving his ankles as much of a roll as he can with his laces loosened. The movement causes him to wince, and Ralph watches in interest as his expression moves between uncertainty and physical discomfort, before he finally tugs his left pant leg free from his boot as well; he hitches it up to the knee and presses his fingers to a spot of skin on his upper calf that makes Ralph hiss in sympathetic pain.

“Jesus, what the hell did _that_?” The large circle of indented, strangely ridged scar tissue can’t be from any wound sustained in combat; even if the shape and pattern of healing looked at all like a bullet hole, knife or shrapnel wound, burn, or anything Ralph saw in training or action, the scar is too old for that. He finds himself leaning forward to look more closely, a professional curiosity he didn’t even realize he had – he’s no professional, for God’s sake, just someone given a task and some basic instructions on how to perform it – sparking to life in his mind.

Gene’s lips pull tight over his teeth as he massages around the spot, but he forces a grin again when he looks up to answer Ralph’s question: “Cottonmouth. Get a lot of ‘em in the bayou, they like standin’ water and it’s tougher to -” Ralph thinks he must look a bit like Babe did when he brought up Cajun faith healers, because Gene chuckles again before backtracking. “- a snake, Ralph, a real nasty viper.”

“ _Jesus._ ” He’s not making himself sound too bright at this point, but the idea of a simple snakebite causing such a strange and ugly scar fills him with as much awe as it does horror. Before he quite realizes what he’s doing, he winds up walking over to where Gene’s seated and plopping down beside him, leaned in very close to get a better look; only when Gene tries to hide a deeply flustered look by turning away just a bit too slowly does Ralph remember himself and back off again. “Never seen nothing like that.”

“You got any snakes at all in Philly?” The sidelong look Gene cants at Ralph as he turns his head back around is so uncharacteristically disdainful that Ralph bursts into sudden, seizing peals of laughter, one arm curled around his stomach and the other hand planted firmly on the floor to steady himself.

“Sorry – that _look_ , Gene, it was – holy shit, sorry, I’m good –” He’s still wheezing for breath, which earns him another look so withering that it nearly sets him off again, but then Gene ruins the effect with a shyly pleased smile and Ralph’s able to calm himself after all. “I’m good, I swear. Why’d it scar so bad, don’t they just poison you?”

While Gene’s expression obviously doesn’t turn as soft and tender as it did when he talked about his grandma, it takes on that same faraway, nostalgic look, and Ralph settles in with even deeper interest when he realizes he might be getting another full childhood anecdote out of this – even if it turns out to be about a horrible wound, hell, they’re medics. What other kinds of childhood stories would they share?

“Different snakes got different sorts of venom,” he explains quietly. “I don’t know all the wherefores behind what does what but this one – doctor told my dad it killed off a bunch of my skin, that’s why there’s a sort of hole there. And other tissue too, s'why it aches sometimes. Said I coulda needed my leg taken off at the knee if it got worse.”

_Jesus_ , Ralph thinks, but stops himself from saying it aloud for a third time. The reaction seems to show clearly enough on his face, anyway, because Gene nods as though he has spoken. “With the way it hurt, an’ then gettin’ so cold I couldn’t feel none of my body at all… it weren’t a real dramatic sorta feeling, but I got real sure that was it for me. The end.” 

As he digests the words, Ralph thinks that Eugene Roe is the only person he’d believe could suspect himself of being on the verge of death without any dramatic reaction to the thought. He also thinks there must be more to this part of the story, because it’s not in Gene’s nature to complain about discomfort as a sort of bragging right, so he stays quiet despite the heavy revelation.

“Made me calmer, actually. I was cryin’ and hollerin’ like my dad never heard before – not even when I was a baby, he said – an’ then I just went real quiet. He started hollerin’ at me ‘cause it scared _him_ so bad.” And Ralph thinks _a-ha_ , nodding along with what Gene hasn’t said just like Gene did to him earlier. “S’right, you seen that too. It ain’t pretty when someone accepts it like that, worse than stickin’ your arms elbow-deep into their guts or tryin' to keep 'em still so you can be some damn help.”

“It’s a relief that they ain’t hurting so bad anymore, they’re not so scared…”

“- but _you_ ain’t ever ready to accept it yet,” Gene finishes solemnly. “Not when it’s on your head and your hands.”

“Gene…” Ralph rests a gentle hand on Gene’s knee, frowning at that choice of words. _On your head and on your hands_ : it makes cold tendrils of anxiety curl around his heart as he takes in Gene’s expression very carefully. “I know it’s awful, so awful not many people’ll ever get it like we do, but it’s not our fault when we lose somebody. It’s not _your_ fault.”

Gene blinks heavily, then turns and looks right at him with eyes gone alarmingly empty. “Then what’re we even doin’ here?”

Before Ralph can process that statement, never mind come up with the answer that Gene clearly needs to hear, heavy footfalls approach the arched opening to their temporary hideaway and just the look on Johnny Martin’s face tells both of them that the break’s over. Neither one bothers to lace up their boots, Gene falling right into step beside Martin to question him about what they’ll find while Ralph follows at their heels and listens carefully. 

For Christ’s sake. A kid nearly killed by his own grenade? This is exactly the kind of emphasis they don’t need put on the absurdity and futility of their actions lately, especially not after what Gene just asked and has, apparently, been thinking about for awhile. 

Ralph can’t help but wonder if that’s why he didn’t answer the question about being sick of their job when it was put to him in Bastogne, or if he sparked off the line of thought in Gene’s head himself when he asked it. He thought that he was just griping to fill the silence so they wouldn’t become absorbed in the much heavier misery all around them, but what if –

Not a useful train of thought right now no matter what the answer, he tells himself firmly. They arrive to a basement packed with soldiers, most of them Easy men but Ralph can also hear harsh, guttural sounds that must be German in all the chaos; Gene’s mere presence causes them to part as if he were Moses facing down the Red Sea, giving them both room to attend to the dying man – boy, the dying _boy,_ who literally made a single mistake that might cost him his cruelly brief life. 

Ralph feels his heart sink in a much more physical, visceral way than he ever has before when Eugene Jackson's fits suddenly cease and he goes still, and Eugene Roe just looks up to confirm everyone’s suspicions with a dark look at Babe Heffron. The affable redhead from back home, who Ralph swears used to smile and joke with alluring ease not all that long ago, can only give a single, helpless shake of his head before looking to the rest of the eerily silent crowd.

All of them look helpless, really, except for Gene; he just looks so grave that Ralph follows right on his heels when he’s able to leave, getting a careful but firm grip on his upper arm and turning him around so that they’re face to face.

“Least he went out fightin’,” Gene says. “Never gave up.”

Ralph loses all of the haphazard words he planned to offer up as some paltry comfort and wraps his arms around Gene instead of speaking, pulling him into a hug that makes his spine stiffen with obvious discomfort for a full ten seconds before he slumps into Ralph’s arms. 

Only later, as they’re walking back to their billet house in stony silence, does Ralph start to backtrack through the progress of the night and, for reasons he doesn’t initially understand, think of his conversation with Babe about the Cajun faith healers. Helping people get things off their chests, soothing them simply by being present, that’s not an uncommon experience for Ralph Spina; having Gene finally accept his hug after the long, long pause that felt like a panicked freeze preceding either fight or flight has him thinking, at last, about how uncommon it must be for Gene Roe to _accept_ such a gesture. As long as Ralph’s known him, Gene has been the sort of man who’s pleasant to everyone but close to no one, only he and Babe becoming rare exceptions because of how they were all forced together in Belgium.

And Babe didn’t even know about the faith healers, which Ralph and Gene had discussed more than once at that point. He’d think it just never came up between them, but there was also Babe’s strange look, like he could hardly believe what he was hearing and then couldn’t believe at all that _Ralph_ didn’t understand the impact of what he was saying.

Then a smile. A little laugh. _That’s not it,_ with no explanation ever given. 

Ralph was so wrapped up in the notion of comforting Babe, even after he fell asleep, that he gave no thought at all to how _Gene_ behaved with him once they were mostly alone. He never has until this exact moment, and when he draws on the memories of Gene’s relaxed smile, warmly twinkling eyes, and slow, lazy delivery of the personal anecdote, his stomach twists with a combination of embarrassment and something very much like the proverbial butterflies. 

Babe wasn’t saying anything all that earth shattering with what he wasn’t saying, but how _do_ you tell someone they’re clearly special in another’s estimation when they don’t see it for themselves? How would Babe have gotten it through his thick skull when it's taken another, similar situation, only one that Ralph would never have known the true gravity of if Gene hadn't shared so much with him earlier, to make everything click into place?

“Thanks,” Gene says when they reach their room, and the combination of suddenly broken silence and unexpected gratitude makes Ralph startle so visibly that Gene moves in closer, searching out his gaze to make sure he’s alright.

“For what?” Ralph laughs unsteadily, nervousness having crept up on him from nowhere and utterly seized his heart instead of just curling around the edges. 

“You – it’s just been easier, all this, since we been –” Gene hesitates but doesn’t break eye contact, and he looks so earnest that Ralph is left open-mouthed and winded by how he finally finishes that sentence. “- we. Since we been _we_.”

_We_ , Ralph repeats to himself with a silent movement of his lips, like he’s never heard the word before or spoken it to Gene in exactly this context: Doc Roe and Doc Spina, the medics, _we_ , a bond he created effortlessly when Gene hasn’t done so with a single other man in Easy Company. The company as a whole, yes - Ralph feels sure of that because Gene brims with the evidence every time he cares for one of them - but no one in the same individual way. Even choosing _we_ over the more correct _us_ carries a powerful sort of impact Ralph can’t explain.

He doesn’t think he’s ever felt so special in his life. 

“It’s nothin’,” he says, then immediately wishes he could take the words back: “- no. I don’t mean it like that.”

Gene just gives him a small, inscrutable smile and takes his hand, not exactly holding it in a proper grip but resting the outside in his palm so he can trace his thumb over the ridges and crevices in _Ralph’s_ palm. Again, he finds himself breathless all at once, like the wind’s been knocked out of him by force.

“Your grandma read palms, too?”

That gets no answer either, or at least no verbal answer; instead, Gene just leans against him and initiates another, gentler hug, which Ralph takes a long moment to return this time, certain that Gene must be able to hear his heart crashing around in his chest.

“Gene, are you –”

“Shh,” Gene breathes, and Ralph shuts right up; then he adds, cautiously, as though second-guessing himself at the last second: “This alright?”

_Don’t talk_ , Ralph reminds himself, because for the first time it’s not coming naturally. _Just be here_. “Yeah. Yeah, this is alright.”

He feels one of Gene’s hands slide up into his his hair and startles again, and when Gene responds by drawing light circles against his scalp, so light they make him shiver, it strikes him all at once that their roles have somehow become reversed – he’s always assumed, with a resigned certainty, that he was the only one of them who felt like this, so now Gene has to soothe _him_ through the process of discovering that he’s not. That's why he feels like he's got no idea what to do all of a sudden, because this isn't the usual script. Everything's upside-down.

The impact is so profound that he can’t keep his goddamn motor mouth shut, speaking up again even after Gene’s made it very clear that there’s no need as long as he’s okay with what happens. “Gene, you don’t gotta –” His words feel pathetic even as they spill out of his mouth, but he can’t bite them back. “- if you got some ideas about thankin’ me –”

Gene immediately steps back enough to look Ralph in the eye, first appearing so offended that Ralph wishes he could fall right through the floor, then confused, then oddly sad. “You give out so much love, Ralph. Don't you think you deserve some back?”

He knows right away, instinctually (because they’re _we_?), that Gene isn’t talking about romance. Gene is talking about the love that keeps them doing what they do here, at war, as medics, that gives him the strength to work himself to the bone to protect their bodies and Ralph the patience to be with people while they hurt inside rather than try to repair them where they can’t be reached. 

But he’s also talking about the little something extra that makes Ralph desperately want to kiss him as they stand there staring into each other’s eyes, because he’s the one who closes the gap and presses their lips together, sighing into Ralph’s mouth in a way that sounds relieved. As if he’s waited for this, even needed it. 

There’s something Ralph never knew about what he knew about himself: that he’s been giving out love all this time, not just a presence to keep someone from being alone. He supposes that’s part of why his hug calmed Gene so completely, because the fact that Gene could feel that love answered his own question about why they were here if they couldn’t save everyone. 

Still, Ralph’s glad in a very selfish way that there’s a level shared just between the two of them. _We._

**Author's Note:**

> As a kind of footnote, the us/we dichotomy is inspired by the fact that it's actually the same word in French (nous), while "we" is a subject and "us" is an object in English sentence structure. Whether or not it does have a deeper meaning as presented here - I waive authorial intent on that so you can decide for yourself.


End file.
